Zlib GzipReader can be confusing

For whatever reasoning, the only way i can get the gzip reader to work is if I use this command:

package_data = “”
Zlib::GzipReader.open(“data/debian_packages_#{right_now}.txt.gz”) { |gzip|
package_data += gzip.read
}

Here is a good reference to how you can use Gzip. Unfortunately I couldn’t get any of the other examples or even my own to work. I kept on getting error: ‘Invalid char `\302′ in expression ruby’ . Whatever that means?

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/rubyckbk/toc.html